Guns, gallstones, death masks and hangman’s ropes are going on display in an exhibition drawn from one of Britain’s most macabre, and least seen, museums.
For more than a century, the Crime Museum inside London police headquarters has only been open to Scotland Yard staff and invited guests. Established in 1875 to help educate officers in the new field of scientific detection, it documents many of Britain’s most notorious crimes, from the Jack the Ripper slayings to the Acid Bath Murders and the Great Train Robbery.
Hundreds of the objects will leave Scotland Yard for the first time as part of an exhibition opening in October at the Museum of London.
Photo: AP
The museum on Thursday announced details of the show, which will include the death masks of criminals hanged at the now-demolished Newgate Prison, a pistol used in an attempt to kill Queen Victoria and notes from a senior detective on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders of women in London’s East End.
Ordinary objects take on sinister meanings. A talcum powder tin turns out to have a secret compartment in which members of a suburban Soviet spy ring hid microdots. A pair of patched and frayed stockings was used to make masks worn by the brothers who committed a 1905 robbery-murder.
“A lot of these objects that we are displaying, they were concerned with murder, they are part of horrific events, but many of them are very everyday and they talk about people’s lives,” co-curator Julia Hoffbrand said.
One of the most chilling displays concerns “Acid Bath Murderer” John Haigh, a 1940s serial killer who dissolved his victims’ bodies in sulfuric acid. The exhibition includes the leather gloves and apron Haigh wore to dispose of wealthy widow Olive Durand-Deacon — and a few tiny, pebble-like objects found amid the stomach-churning sludge in his workshop. They are gallstones, the only part of Durand-Deacon to survive the acid.
Haigh was hanged for murder.
On a less chilling note, there is an empty champagne bottle left behind in a hideout by perpetrators of a 1963 mail-train heist known as the Great Train Robbery.
The robbers got away with £2.6 million (more than US$60 million today) — but left fingerprints on the bottle and elsewhere.
Most of the gang was soon rounded up.
One item missing from the exhibition is the ricin pellet, lodged on an umbrella tip, that killed Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978. Hoffbrand said curators had hoped to include it, but it was not allowed to leave Scotland Yard because the case remains open.
Police and city hall officials hope the exhibition, which runs for six months from Oct. 9, will be the forerunner of a permanent public museum for Scotland Yard.
Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was important to strike the right tone and keep crime victims at the center of the story.
“What we do not want is something that’s a macabre police version of going to the London Dungeon,” a kitschy tourist attraction, he said.
“I would be very disappointed if anyone comes away thinking were are glamorizing any of the people who have committed the offenses in this exhibition,” Hewitt said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not